JOHN BRUMMETT: Dissecting Iowa

Editor's note: This is an updated version of a column first appearing online-only on Wednesday.

Republicans won Monday night.

They emerged from Iowa with, in Marco Rubio, a viable establishment alternative and solid general-election prospect.

The whip-smart boy wonder is now fully and evenly engaged with the two blustery front-runners of high negatives, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.

Democrats, on the other hand, limped from Iowa with an inevitable nominee in Hillary Clinton, who is looking like a 1990s relic.

She relies on old folks in a young person's world. She is having a devil of a time with a shouting old socialist who, at the very best, might carry a half-dozen states in a general election.


First to the happier Republicans:

Had Trump won, he might have been on his unstoppable way, since he leads in New Hampshire and South Carolina. Yet more than half the country rejects in a general-election context the notion of such a blowhard, such an offender of sensibilities, as president.

Trump's campaign theme was that he was ahead in polls. Then he lost the first poll that counted.

The Cruz victory in Iowa means much less than a Trump victory would have meant.

Offensive as it surely was to his congressional colleagues who detest Cruz's grandstanding, the piously posturing Texan's plurality was merely a right-wing church thing. In fact, that is what an Iowa Republican caucus has become.

The Cruz win was no more broadly significant than Mike Huckabee's in Iowa in 2008 and Rick Santorum's in 2012.

The real winner was Rubio, coming up on the outside with a late-developing campaign based in Iowa's population centers where there are a lot of conventional professional and suburban Republicans--Romney voters.

Rubio is Romney with more spice and better religious-right bona fides.

Some observers criticized Rubio's Iowa campaign, which was directed by veteran Arkansas political operative Clint Reed, for waiting so late and focusing so narrowly. But it was smart.

He didn't need to waste time and money on an all-in statewide campaign that was going to be won by either the evangelicals for Cruz or by Trump's superficial celebrity.

The best Rubio could ever hope for was third, and he could get there almost by default. So the test became whether his third would be a weak and distant one that would deflate his candidacy or a strong and surging one that would put him on a cloud bound for New Hampshire.

It was a strong, surging third that put him on a cloud. Heck, he nearly beat Trump for second.

Rubio took votes from Trump, who had been strutting around Iowa with Jerry Falwell Jr. and trying to convince Iowa's religious right that he was just what the Lord ordered for America. Rubio took a great many of those votes by putting his own conservative religion on his sleeve where the evangelicals demand that their favored politicians keep it.

MSNBC analyst Chris Matthews said something very smart Monday night. It was that Rubio has the ability to be different things to different people.

Some evangelicals see him as nearly a Bible-thumping equivalent of Cruz. Some more general arch-conservatives see him as a Tom Cotton-type warrior and Koch brothers-type deregulator. But some see him as a pleasant near-moderate, since everything is relative.

Trump could make nearly anyone seem pleasant. Cruz could make nearly anyone seem moderate.

Here's what's going to be fun: The Arkansas Republican presidential primary March 1.

Now that Mike Huckabee has mercifully exited, our local contest of Rubio versus Cruz versus Trump will be positively scintillating.

I'm liking Rubio to win it. Two of the most reactionary right-wingers in the Legislature, Bart Hester of Cave Springs and David Meeks of Conway, are in his camp. If he can get establishment Republicans plus a share of the screwballs--that's just the ticket to victory in regressed Arkansas these days.

Now to the sadder Democrats:

Hillary called the outcome a win for her. But it essentially was a tie. It gave her no boost. It was good for her only if that she doesn't have to listen to the pundits dig her grave over an actual loss.

The difference in statewide delegate-equivalencies, a horrid Democratic caucus calculation that needs to be abandoned, was a mere four in approximately 1,400.

Hillary is an irony: She seriously contends to make history as the first woman president, but she seems old news and to excite hardly anyone. She starts to remind vaguely of Al Gore and Hubert Humphrey.

Now she must immediately endure, most likely, a pretty substantial drubbing in New Hampshire before she can get south to black votes and back in to some victories.

I've long been on record predicting Clinton versus Rubio and calling Rubio the candidate Hillary most fears, for good reason. Iowa gave that wavering prediction and analysis a good night.

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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 02/04/2016

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